Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

The basics of being a ScrumMaster are fairly straightforward: At face value all a ScrumMaster needs to do is facilitate the Scrum process and remove impediments. But being a great ScrumMaster, one who truly embodies the principles of servant-leadership and helps move a team to the high performance levels possible with Scrum, is much harder and much more elusive.

In this book Geoff shares a collection of stories and practical guidance, drawn from over ten years of coaching numerous Scrum teams that will guide you on your path to greatness.

In this book you will learn:

The skills and characteristics of great ScrumMasters

How to generate, maintain and increase engagement from the team

How to increase the effectiveness of the Scrum meetings, such as retrospectives and daily scrums.

How to foster a more creative and collaborative team

How to increase the performance of the team

How to know when you are a successful ScrumMaster

Scrum Mastery is for practicing ScrumMasters who want to develop themselves into a great servant-leader capable of taking their teams beyond simple process compliance.

Mike Cohn, in his foreword for the book, said:

"Most books rehash well-trod territory and I don’t finish them any wiser. I am positive I will be referring back to this book for many years"

Roman Pichler said:

"I am thoroughly impressed with how comprehensive and well-written the book is. It will be indispensable for many people"

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Geoff Watts is the founder of Inspect & Adapt Ltd and one of the most experienced and respected Scrum coaches in the world. Having started using Scrum at British Telecom, one of the first large-scale agile adoptions, he has since coached organisations large and small through their agile journeys.

An inspirational speaker at international conferences, he is at the cutting edge of the developments in the agile world. As well as his wealth of knowledge in the agile field, he is also passionate about promoting servant-leadership through his coaching practice.

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

I’m a Geoff Watts fan, and it’s not just because of the clean, crisp, British accent that silently exudes from the pages. I’m the kind of Scrum Master that doesn’t leave home without cards and a bucket of scrum candy. Three companies and five years going I have been playing this Scrum Master gig. The scenarios in his book are true and real. Anyone that chooses this very unlikely career path will find themselves in these situations. My advice, be prepared. Be overly prepared. Read everything you can on this subject. Take classes. Talk to people that have done it before. If I had money like Richard Branson, I would bribe this guy to mentor me. Luckily, he has written more than just one book.

Probably the most common problem of all are Scrum teams are team members showing up late for Scrum. Watts describes such a situation in one of the chapters. In the team’s retrospective, the team did not directly confront the team member, instead they kept to general statements and working agreements like “we should be on time to Scrum.” The “right answer” according to Watts would have been for the team to directly confront the team member. I wish he would have gone into detail how THAT went over. In my experience, most people would act defensive or overly emotional (for Americans maybe? Ha!). The only times I’ve seen this go over well is when a team member accepts the criticism, and that kind of emotional intelligence is not common. What is common, in my experience, is a reaction of stink eye looks and zombie impersonation. On occasion, cuss words combined with sarcasm explode like a door slamming in the center of a black hole in the middle of the universe.

Watts makes an astute observation that I don’t see acknowledged often in other agile books; “...each person either blocked or helped the problem solving process, whether intentionally or not”. Heavens to Murgatroyd! Do you ever notice how often this happens in Congress? When this happened in my own team, I used Watts’ words to describe my observation “Knocking down another person’s suggestion makes them less likely to offer one in the future.” In practice, I discovered that the teammate “getting knocked down” felt supported. And the person with the “yes, but…” tried to defend their position as well but offered more the second time around. It was a good tactic.

What I would like to see more from Watts is how to deal with difficult team members. He does say that by “make a hole [remove the difficult team member], to make [the team] whole”. I agree with this, but it’s not that easy to vote people off the island and out of the sprint team. One, there are HR policies in place to protect rights on both sides, the company and the person, and second, sometimes management just does not agree that the person IS a problem, especially if the person is a rock star. I would like to see more tactics from Watts how he deals with the zombies, the vampires, the werewolves and all the other devil advocates that contribute to software development. Just because someone is difficult to work with, does not mean they can’t make a great contribution to team. What are some exact tactics?

If I was a Scrum Alliance board member, I would make this required reading before giving out Scrum Master certifications. And then I would make everyone write an Amazon review on it; not to prove that they read the material but to prove they thought about it. It takes thoughtfulness how to deal with people and teams. For example, how one personality responses to a question will not be the same as another. The permutations of outcomes can be numerous, outrageous, and that is why Scrum Masters must learn to be more than just courageous. They must walk confidence. This book is just one of many tools to make Scrum Masters, true Masters.

Just learning the basics from the Scrum Guide was not enabling me to adequately support my team. Scrum Mastery enabled me to not only review the basics but see how to become a great Scrum Master. My team saw a change in me before I even finished the book and I saw a wonderful reaction to the change in their productivity and overall team dynamics. A must read for all who want to grow in Scrum.

This book has a lot of good ideas and examples to run by you. I think that the only area for improvement might be to have even more examples and war stories. (But that might dilute the impact of the advice a little. There's a lot of suggested additional reading too, which serves some of this purpose.)

This is a great book. I've worked in Scrum "environments" since 2008, but never knew the full scope of what Scrum can do. This book is good for people of all levels of knowledge of Scrum. I learned a lot and it changed the way I've been working my projects.